Towards a formal foundation of behavioral types for UML state-machines

Abstract

Behavioral types for model-based development comprise abstract behavioral aspects of the models they are associated with. Behavioral types allow checking that a model fulfills these behavioral aspects. Furthermore, as types can be related with each other, they support more complex checks and guarantees like compatibility in composition and refinement of models in a model based development process. We propose a behavioral type system and explain its properties, specically targeting a subset of UML state-machines. We present an early implementation that generates behavioral type definitions out of an Eclipse-based modeling environment. These type definitions are generated for the higher-order proof assistant Coq as files. We present checking and comparison techniques based on these files for behavioral aspects that can be derived from the model definition.